Jammu, September 19:
This forenoon, the otherwise administrative quadrangle of the Directorate of School Education, Jammu, transfigured itself into a veritable hortus conclusus — a walled garden of hope — as tender saplings were ceremoniously committed to the earth beneath the solemn rubric of Seva Parv 2025. What, in the vocabulary of botany, may be registered as mere transplantation of vegetal life, here assumed the dignity of an ethical act, an ecological vow, a sacrament of futurity.
Executed in synergic consociation with the Department of Social Forestry, the event was neither a perfunctory exercise in greening nor an ornamental gesture of civic embellishment; rather, it was an educative performance of responsibility, a reminder that the curriculum of conscience must extend beyond the chalkboard into the soil.
Director School Education Jammu, Dr. Naseem Javid Chowdhary, addressing the gathering of students and staff, declaimed with a voice weighted in both gravity and hope: “The canopy under which the children of tomorrow will find shade depends upon the courage with which the children of today place roots into the ground.” His pronouncement, at once hortatory and philosophical, re-inscribed the plantation drive as a meditation on temporal reciprocity — how the present, by stooping to sow, stands upright in the eyes of posterity.
The participating students, in lowering saplings into the womb of the earth, enacted more than an agrarian ritual; they inscribed a green syllable into the long manuscript of civilization. Each leaf to unfurl henceforth shall bear testimony to the covenant written today between man and nature, between knowledge and responsibility.
Thus, what commenced as a plantation drive concluded as a pedagogical parable: that the health of tomorrow germinates, inexorably, in the shaded patience of what we plant today.
